For all 10 to 18 year-olds!

Thames Music Theatre’s second 2026 production will be:

Richard Stilgoe writes:

Your Tummy rumbles. You hiccup, blush, have pins and needles or goose-pimples. The left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth, and your foot has gone to sleep. You put on a brave face, and carry on, ignoring yet again the fierce internal struggles waging within your body.

The body is managed by the brain, the soul and the heart. The Brain believes in efficiency and self-help. Dominic, the soul, has woozier, more gentle views. The Heart believes in honest toil and full employment. Together with the pituitary gland they govern an unruly collection of nerves, white cells, red cells, muscles, senses and hormones. Bodywork tells the story of a day in the life of the various bits of a male body. The Soul dreams, the Brain wakes, the Heart pumps on. The body goes to work, gets injured, falls in love, has a shower, goes out to dinner, smokes, gets drunk and falls in the river. Germs sneak in and spread discontent. The Soul threatens to leave. Has the body damaged itself irreparably, or can it pick up the pieces and keep civilisation going?

It's taken you about a hundred and ten heartbeats to read this. Your eyes have sent the shapes of the words to your brain, and your brain has recognised the words and made sense of them. Meanwhile, the stomach has been digging goodness out of your last meal, the nerves have checked that you're not too hot or too cold, and a germ has sneaked up on one of your white cells and mugged it.

Jeremy James Taylor writes:

Written in 1987 especially for the National Youth Music Theatre, which was a company always looking for shows that offered wonderful roles for all ages between 10 and 19, Richard Stilgoe came up with the ingenious and intriguing idea of setting a musical which takes place inside the human body featuring a day in the life of 21-year-old man. There are a multitude of characters ranging from the Heart and the Brain through to the Muscles and the Blood Cells, the Hair and the Skin, the Hormones, the Stomach, the Nerves and the Genes and countless more - not forgetting, of course, the poor old Appendix - useless and lonely!

Just imagine what havoc occurs when our man has a meal or injures himself with a screwdriver. Organised chaos!! Famous for its brilliant lyrics and wonderful tunes BODYWORK ticks all the boxes. Loads of roles for young and old. Lots of big chorus numbers. Lots of dancing - and quite a lot of rude noises!!

It's a hoot from beginning to end - and as well as having enormous fun, you’ll learn loads about what is going on inside you! See you at the auditions!

You might like to listen to some of the songs from the show:

The INTESTINE and THE COMPANY singing “Black Forest Gateau”
The GENES singing “Everybody says I’m just like Dad”
DOMINIC and THE COMPANY singing “Don’t go”
The HORMONES singing “Testosterone”